One of the particularities inherent to life on tour is that you are far from your loved ones. Of course, I have a wonderful group of friends here at Cirque and I love them to pieces but I also have a family in Canada and other friends who are not part of Cirque du Soleil. Yes, there IS a life outside of the circus, or so I've been told. And since I am about a gazillion miles away from all of those people, I cannot go to the movies with them, I cannot take them out to lunch or invite them over for tea.

So how do we keep in touch? We talk on the phone. We write emails and chat over the internet. We exchange pictures of beautiful or silly things that we saw. I am a big fan of technology because thanks to inventions such as the telephone, jumbo jets or the internet, distance really does not "exist" anymore. It doesn't matter if you're in Madrid, Montreal or Mumbai. You can still have a chat with your mom or your best friend. (actually, it does matter because I'd much rather have lunch with my mom and take my best friend to the movies but it's besides my point and I really do have one).

Enter Sunparks. First, as I mentioned before, there are no telephones in the "villas" at Sunparks. Yes, you read correctly. No telephones here. Nada. Not even one of those antique crank things. If you go outside on the street there are some pay phones but that's not very useful when you want to call overseas because the rates you get on long distance calls are completely ridiculous. And guess what, nearly ALL the calls I make are overseas! Plus, the pay phones are outside and it rains a lot in this country. Almost every single day. The pay phones are also not much help for people who are trying to reach you!

So Cirque, goes and gets us some local SIM cards to put in our personal cell phones. While I appreciate the gesture, I have to say you really get what you pay for. They got the cards for free because the phone company probably figured they would make a fortune selling us refills, given that we were stranded in the middle of nowhere with no other way of reaching out to the outside world.

Well, many of us had problems with the cards. Mine could not send SMS (which made it useless since that's how I communicate with some of my friends overseas). Some could not receive calls, you would end up directly in their voice mail. And no matter if you used it or not, if you didn't recharge it 30 days after first activation, it would expire permanently. So I just put back my good ol' SIM card with my US number which costs me a bit more to make (and unfortunately receive) calls but which actually WORKS!

As for making overseas calls, well at first I tried to make them from work with a long distance card but of course, the way time zones work, the only time I could reach my friends and family was late at night after the show. I hate time zones... The problem with calling from work after the show is that there is only one shuttle bus and it leaves 30 minutes after the show ends.

If you're not ready to go then, you have only two options: the tram (which runs until about half past midnight) and the taxi. As you may remember from Chapter 3, the tram option involves a walk in the forest, then along a dark road with no sidewalk. The taxi option costs 30 Euros and includes a free insight into how much of a moron a belgian cab driver can be. Inbreeding at work here, no doubt!

Some time around M-Day (we'd been here for three weeks), Cirque had Sunparks install 3 telephones on a table in the corridor outside the common room. That is how I have been calling home ever since. BUT... It is still a quarter of a mile from my house. It's in a corridor where there is nowhere comfortable to sit for a long time. There are only three telephones. There is no privacy because the telephone cords are only about six feet long. And they took THREE FRIGGIN' WEEKS to get them there in the first place!!!! I think when I get to Zurich I'll probably go crazy and start calling everybody I know just because I have a telephone in my hotel room!

Now, about the Internet access... Before we moved in, we were told that there would be free Wi-Fi access on the property. Not in the "villas" of course but in the public areas where the common room is located. So I figured the place couldn't be that bad, right? Wrong! First of all, if you show up around 8AM when there is nobody around, you will probably get relatively decent speed. But the bandwidth is so shallow that anything more than 3 or 4 users and you must use every bit of your patience to even download email without attachments. I'm talking worse than dialup here. MUCH worse than dialup.

Plus, the FTP port is blocked in their firewall. Can you imagine how much fun it was to upload this entire web site piece by piece using the web interface? The iChat port is also blocked. I managed to find a workaround for that one after some trial and error but still, that service really sucks. Once again, you get what you pay for... And the sad thing is, I WOULD have paid good money for the option of having a phone and decent internet service in my house. It would have made my life so much easier, would have saved me so much time. But it just was not an option.

TO BE CONTINUED...